“You two hoping to walk back out that door?” he said when they took their seats.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then tell me why I gotta replace my Boston management group.”
They did, and as they talked, Joe kept looking for some indication in those dark eyes that he saw their point or didn’t, but it was like talking to a marble floor—the only thing you got back, if you caught the light right, was your own reflection.
When they finished, Lucky stood and looked out the window at Sixth Avenue. “You’ve made a lot of noise down there. What happened to that Holy Roller who died? Wasn’t her father police chief?”
“They forced him into retirement,” Joe said. “Last I heard he was at some kind of sanitarium. He can’t hurt us.”
“But his daughter did. And you let her. That’s why the word on you is that you’re soft. Not a coward. I didn’t say that. Everyone knows how close you got to take care of that yokel back in ’30 and that ship heist took brass ones. But you didn’t take care of that ’shiner back in ’31 and you let a dame—a fucking dame, Coughlin—block your casino play.”
“That’s true,” Joe said. “I got no excuse.”
“No, you don’t,” Luciano said. He looked across the desk at Dion. “What would you have done with the ’shiner?”
Dion looked uncertainly at Joe.
“Don’t you look at him,” Luciano said. “You look at me and you tell me straight.”
But Dion continued to look at Joe until Joe said, “Tell him the truth, D.”
Dion turned to Lucky. “I would have turned out his fucking lights, Mr. Luciano. His sons’ too.” He snapped his fingers. “Taken out the whole family.”
“And the Holy Roller dame?”
“Her I would have disappeared-like.”
“Why?”
“Give her people the option of turning her into a saint. They can tell themselves she’s immaculately concepted up to heaven, whatever. Meanwhile, they’d damn well know we chopped her up and fed her to the reptiles, so they’d never fuck with us again, but the rest of the time, they’d gather in her name and sing her praises.”
Luciano said, “You’re the one Pescatore said was a rat.”
“Yup.”
“Never made sense to us.” He said to Joe, “Why would you knowingly trust a rat who sent you up the river for two years?”
Joe said, “I wouldn’t.”
Luciano nodded. “That’s what we thought when we tried to talk the old man out of the hit.”
“But you sanctioned it.”
“We sanctioned it if you refused to use our trucks and our unions in your new liquor business.”
“Maso never brought that up to me.”
“No?”
“No, sir. He just said I was going to take orders from his son and I had to kill my friend.”
Luciano stared at him for a long time.
“All right,” he said eventually, “make your proposal.”
“Make him boss.” Joe jerked his thumb at Dion.
Dion said, “What?”
Luciano smiled for the first time. “And you’ll stay on as consigliere?”
“Yes.”
Dion said, “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”
Luciano looked at him and the smile died on his face.
Dion read the tea leaves fast. “I’d be honored.”
Luciano said, “Where you from?”
“Town called Manganaro in Sicily.”
Luciano’s eyebrows rose. “I’m from Lercara Friddi.”
“Oh,” Dion said. “The big town.”
Luciano came around the desk. “You gotta be from a real shithole like Manganaro to call Lercara Friddi the ‘big town.’ ”
Dion nodded. “That’s why we left.”
“When was that? Stand up.”
Dion stood. “I was eight.”
“Been back?”
“Why would I go back?” Dion said.
“It’ll remind you of who you are. Not who you pretend to be. Who you are.” He put an arm around Dion’s shoulders. “And you’re a boss.” He pointed at Joe. “And he’s a brain. Let’s go have some lunch. I know a great place a few blocks from here. Best gravy in the city.”
They left the office, and four men fell in around them as they headed for the elevator.
“Joe,” Lucky said, “I need to introduce you to my friend, Meyer. He’s got some great ideas about casinos in Florida and in Cuba.” Now Luciano put his arm around Joe. “You know much about Cuba?”
Chapter Twenty-seven
A Gentleman Farmer in Pinar del Río
When Joe Coughlin met up with Emma Gould in Havana in the late spring of 1935, it had been nine years since the speakeasy robbery in South Boston. He remembered how cool she’d been that morning, how unflappable, and how those qualities had unnerved him. He’d then mistaken being unnerved for being smitten and mistook being smitten for being in love.
He and Graciela had been in Cuba almost a year, staying at first in the guesthouse of one of Esteban’s coffee plantations high in the hills of Las Terrazas, about fifty miles west of Havana. In the morning they woke to the smell of coffee beans and cocoa leaves while mist ticked and dripped off the trees. In the evenings, they walked the foothills while rags of fading sunlight clung to the thick treetops.
Graciela’s mother and sister visited one weekend and never left. Tomas, not even crawling when they’d arrived, took his first step late in his tenth month. The women spoiled him shamelessly and fed him to the point he turned into a ball with thick, wrinkly thighs. But once he began to walk, he quickly began to run. He would run through the fields and up and down the slopes, and the women would chase him so that very soon he was not a ball but a slim boy with his father’s light hair but his mother’s dark eyes and skin that was a cocoa-butter combination of them both.
Joe made a few trips back to Tampa on the tin goose, a Ford Trimotor 5-AT that rattled in the wind and lurched and dipped without warning. He exited a couple of times with his ears so blocked he couldn’t hear the rest of the day. The air nurses gave him gum to chew and cotton to stuff in there, but it was still a primitive way to travel and Graciela wanted no part of it. So he would make the trip without her and find that he missed her and Tomas at a physical level. He would wake in the middle of the night at their house in Ybor with stomach pain so sharp it stole his breath.
As soon as his business was concluded he’d take the first plane he could get down to Miami. Take the next available one out of there.
It wasn’t that Graciela didn’t want to return to Tampa—she did. She just didn’t want to fly there. And she didn’t want to return right now. (Which, Joe suspected, meant she really didn’t want to go back.) So they stayed in the hills of Las Terrazas, and her mother and sister, Benita, were joined by a third sister, Ines. Whatever bad blood had existed between Graciela, her mother, Benita, and Ines looked to have been healed by time and the presence of Tomas. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, Joe followed the sound of their laughter to catch them dressing Tomas like a girl.
One morning Graciela asked if they could buy a place here.
“Here?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be right here. But in Cuba,” she said. “Just a place we could visit.”
“We’d be ‘visiting’?” Joe smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “I must get back to work soon.”
She didn’t really. On his trips back, Joe had checked in on the people in whose care she’d left her various charities, and they were all trustworthy men and women. She could stay away from Ybor for a decade and all her organizations would still be standing, hell, flourishing, when she returned.
“Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a big place. Or a fancy place. Or a—”
/> “Graciela,” Joe said, “pick whatever you want. You see something and it’s not for sale? Offer them double.”
Not unheard of in those days. Cuba, hit by the Depression worse than most countries, was taking tentative steps toward recovery. The abuses of the Machado regime had been replaced by the hope of Colonel Fulgencio Batista, leader of the Sergeants Revolt that had sent Machado packing. The official president of the Republic was Carlos Mendieta, but everyone knew Batista and his army ran the show. So favored was this arrangement, the American government had started pouring money into the island five minutes after the revolt that put Machado on a plane to Miami. Money for hospitals and roads and museums and schools and a new commercial district along the Malecón. Colonel Batista not only loved the American government, but he also loved the American gambler, so Joe, Dion, Meyer Lansky, and Esteban Suarez, among others, had full access to the highest offices in government. They’d already purchased ninety-nine-year leases on some of the best land along the Parque Central and in the Tacon Market district.
There was no end to the money they’d make.
Graciela said Mendieta was Batista’s puppet and Batista was the puppet of United Fruit and the United States; he’d raid the coffers and rape the land, while the United States kept him propped in place because America believed good deeds could somehow follow bad money.
Joe didn’t argue. He also didn’t point out that they, themselves, had followed bad money with good deeds. Instead he asked her about this house she’d found.
It was a bankrupt tobacco plantation, actually, just outside the village of Arcenas, fifty miles farther west in the Pinar del Río province. It came with a guesthouse for her family and endless fields of black soil for Tomas to run in. The day Joe and Graciela purchased it from the widow, Domenica Gomez, she introduced them to Ilario Bacigalupi outside the attorney’s office. Ilario, she explained, would teach them everything there was to know about farming tobacco, if they were interested.
Joe looked at the small round man with the bandit’s mustache as the widow’s driver whisked her away in a two-toned Detroit Electric. He’d noticed Ilario with the Widow Gomez a few times, always in the background, and had assumed he was a bodyguard in a region where kidnapping wasn’t unheard of. But now he noticed the scarred, oversize hands, the prominence of their bones.
He’d never thought about what he’d do with all those fields.
Ilario Bacigalupi, on the other hand, had given it plenty of thought.
First, he explained to Joe and Graciela, no one called him Ilario; they called him Ciggy, which had nothing to do with tobacco. As a child he’d been incapable of pronouncing his own last name, always getting hung up on the second syllable.
Ciggy told them that 20 percent of the village of Arcenas had, until very recently, depended on the Gomez plantation for work. Since Senor Farmer Gomez had fallen to drink and then fallen off his horse and then fallen into insanity and sickness, there had been no work. For three harvests, Ciggy said, no work. It was why many of the children in the village wore no pants. Shirts, carefully tended to, could last a lifetime, but pants always gave way at some point in the seat or the knees.
Joe had noticed a prevalence of bare-assed children on his drives through Arcenas. Hell, if they weren’t bare-assed, they were naked. Arcenas, in the foothills of Pinar del Río, was more the hope of a village than an actual one. It was a collection of sagging huts with roofs and walls constructed of dried palm fronds. Human waste exited through a trio of ditches that flowed into the same river from which the villagers drank. There was no mayor or town leader to speak of. The streets were cuts of mud.
“We don’t know anything about farming,” Graciela said.
By this point, they were in a cantina in Pinar del Río City.
“I do,” Ciggy said. “I know so much, senorita, that whatever I’ve forgotten is not worth teaching.”
Joe looked into Ciggy’s cagey, knowing eyes and reevaluated the relationship between the foreman and the widow. He’d thought the widow had kept Ciggy for protection, but he now realized Ciggy had spent the sales process watching after his livelihood and making sure the Widow Gomez knew what was expected of her.
“How would you start?” Joe asked him, pouring them all another glass of rum.
“You will need to prepare the seed beds and plow the fields. First thing, patrón. First thing. The season starts next month.”
“Can you stay out of my wife’s way while she fixes up the house?”
He nodded at Graciela several times. “Of course, of course.”
“How many men will you need for this?” she asked.
Ciggy explained that they would need men and children to seed and men to build the seedbeds. They would need men or children to monitor the soil for fungus and disease and mold. They would need men and children to plant and hoe and plow some more and kill the cut worms and mole crickets and stinkbugs. They would need a pilot who didn’t drink too much to dust the crops.
“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “How much work does this take?”
“We haven’t even discussed topping, suckering, or harvesting,” Ciggy said. “Then there is the stringing, the hanging, the curing, having someone tend the fire in the barn.” He waved his big hand at the breadth of the labor.
Graciela asked, “How much would we make?”
Ciggy pushed the figures across the table to them.
Joe sipped his rum as he looked them over. “So, a good year, if there’s no blue mold or locusts or hailstorms and God shines his light down on Pinar del Río without stop, we make four percent back on our investment.” He looked across the table at Ciggy. “That right?”
“Yes. Because you are only using a quarter of your land. But if you invest in your other fields, bring them back to the state they were in fifteen years ago? In five years, you will be rich.”
“We’re already rich,” Graciela said.
“You will be richer.”
“What if we don’t care about being richer?”
“Then think of it this way,” Ciggy said, “if you leave the village to starve, you may find them all sleeping in your field one morning.”
Joe sat up in his chair. “Is that a threat?”
Ciggy shook his head. “We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.” He solemnly made the sign of the cross. “But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?”
“Not on my land,” Joe said.
“But it’s not your land. It’s God’s. You are renting it. This rum? This life?” He patted his chest. “We are all just renting from God.”
The main house needed almost as much work as the farm.
While the planting season began outside, the nesting season took over on the inside. Graciela had all the walls replastered and repainted, had the flooring in half the house ripped up and replaced when they arrived. There was only one toilet; there were four by the time Ciggy started the topping process.
By then, the rows of tobacco stood about four feet high. Joe woke one morning to air so sweet and fragrant it immediately made him consider the curve of Graciela’s neck with lust. Tomas lay sleeping in his crib when Graciela and Joe went to the balcony and looked out on the fields. They’d been brown when Joe went to sleep, but now a carpet of green sported pink and white blossoms that glittered in the soft morning light. Joe and Graciela looked across the breadth of their land, from the balcony of their house to the foothills of Sierra del Rosario, and the blossoms glittered as far as they could see.
Graciela, standing in front of him, reached back and placed her hand to his neck. He put his arms around her abdomen and placed his chin in the hollow of her neck.
“And you don’t believe in God,” she said.
>
He took a deep breath of her. “And you don’t believe good deeds can follow bad money.”
She chuckled and he could feel it in his hands and against his chin.
Later that morning, the workers and their children arrived and went through the fields, stalk by stalk, removing the blossoms. Plants spread their leaves as if they were great birds, and from his window the next morning Joe could no longer see the soil, nor any blossoms. The farm, under Ciggy’s stewardship, continued to work without a hitch. For the next stage, he brought in even more children from the village, dozens of them, and sometimes Tomas would laugh uncontrollably because he could hear their laughter in the fields. Joe sat up some nights, listening to the sounds of the boys playing baseball in one of the fallow fields. They’d play until the last of the light had left the sky, using only a broomstick and what remained of a regulation ball they’d found somewhere. The cowhide covering and the wool yarn was long gone, but they’d managed to salvage the cork center.
He listened to their shouts and the snap of the stick against the ball, and he thought of something Graciela had said recently about giving Tomas a little brother or little sister soon.
And he thought, Why stop at one?
Repairing the house moved more slowly than resurrecting the farm. One day Joe traveled to Old Havana, to look up Diego Alvarez, an artist who specialized in the restoration of stained glass. He and Senor Alvarez agreed on a price and a good week for him to make the hundred-mile journey to Arcenas and repair the windows Graciela had salvaged.
After the meeting, Joe visited a jeweler on Avenida de las Misiones that Meyer had recommended. His father’s watch, which had been losing time for more than a year, had stopped completely a month ago. The jeweler, a middle-aged man with a sharp face and a perpetual squint, took the watch and opened the back of it, and explained to Joe that while he owned a very fine watch, it still needed to be tended to more than once every ten years. The parts, he said to Joe, all these delicate parts, you see them? They need to be reoiled.
“How long will it take?” Joe asked.